There’s Blood In My Stool - Bloody Poop 3*Bloody Roar 3* Review.
Developed by Hudson Soft.
Published by Activision.
Playstation 2.
Released June 25th, 2001.
Purchased copy.
Trial By Stone!
After the hard-won peace achieved in the previous game, a new bad actor emerges to threaten the stability of the world.
A mysterious man and a powerful, ancient tablet draw the Zoanthropes from around the world to a single location.
One would ask why a cast of mostly heroes/good guys would be fighting each other, and not teaming up against the main antagonist:
The more important thing is that the STORY & ARCADE Modes from Bloody Roar 2 have been combined; the presentation is the same, but there’s only an intro/ending now.
It’s a fine compromise, but the unlockable fighters get no insight into their story.
Beakless Eagle.
Eighting/HUDSON apparently thought they had supercharged Bloody Roar 2, too much, because Bloody Roar 3 is sluggish compared the fast and fluid game that came before.
They’ve taken a step back, it’s not that Bloody Roar 3 is unresponsive, it’s just that the game needs to buffer all the player’s inputs before they play out on screen.
It forces the player to carefully consider their moves and plan them out, instead of reacting quickly and correctly on the fly.
It’s plain awkward to consciously slow down my button presses to avoid wasting moves by accident, I can respond quicker than the game can actually handle, giving me an impression of a slower game.
The camera is far too zoomed in, the fighters now take up too much screen space, which causes issues since the camera like to move around a great deal.
A default setting has the walls of the arena appearing transparent, combined with the zoomed in camera, creates a disorienting effect for the player.
Bloody Roar 2’s camera was at just the right distance; the player could see a fighter’s moves, and the camera could move around more freely while always keeping the action on the center of the screen.
Throw Escaping is a new defensive option where a fighter can prevent themselves from taking damage from a grapple attempt by the other fighter.
By combining [Guard + Punch] right before a throw animation starts, that throw is thwarted and both fighters return to their default positions.
The window of success is so narrow that this move is prohibitively difficult to pull off in an actual fight, the timing is so strict because the player has to know when a throw animation begins, as it can’t be done DURING a throw.
A much better defensive option is the Guard Escape which is a combination of [Guard + D-Pad Towards the Opponent] at the same time, right before an attack would land.
It’s difficult to pull off consistently, but it’s a safer technique, where failure usually results in a successful heavy block.
The benefits are a fighter can avoid all incoming damage entirely!
A fighter won’t have to deal with block stun(which keeps a defending player from immediately acting), or blocking damage from an opposing beast-form fighter’s attacks.
I prefer this new mechanic over the Throw Evasion, however to master it I would need intimate knowledge of every attack, from every character in the game, because the timing has to be ultra precise.
The Beast Meter now gradually fills on its own, on top of gaining meter by attacking and recieving damage.
There’s nothing wrong with this, other than it being unnecessary.
Returning fighters retain their Beast Drives from the original, but gain an additional one in this game(new character start with two).
The same rules apply, yes Beast Drives are very powerful, by they have to connect to deal damage, whether they land or not a fighter who uses them reverts back to human form with an empty Beast Meter.
The worst new technique Bloody Roar 3 added was the “Hyper Beast Mode”, a poorly though out new form as unnecessary and garish as the Super Saiyan 4/Super Saiyan God Super Saiyan forms of the more recent Dragon Ball shows.
A fighter gets 12 in-game seconds where their Beast Form is even stronger, faster, and harder to stun/knock down, and their opponent will barely be able to block a Hyper Beasts’ attacks.
12 seconds in a fighting game is an eternity, and a Hyper Beast can also use that time to spam their Beast Drives endlessly; the only down side here, is that a Hyper Beast using player cannot transform again until the next match.
None of the drawbacks matter if a fighter can gain such a commanding lead like this, I don’t know how many victories I was robbed of because the A.I. cheated and used this nonsense to eliminate my entire health bar.
This new mechanic completely breaks the fighting in this game, where every match hypotheticaally turns into which fighter can spam their Beast Drives in 12 seconds the most effectively, because the Hyper Beast Form completely contradicts the rules of the vanilla Beast Form!
The worst part of the Hyper Beast Form is that it can’t be toggled off in an options menu...
Burrs In My Fur.
It may seem petty to point this out, the sound design in this game is awful; The pre-fight loading screens no longer have an announcer, saying the name’s of the fighters, and all character’s voice actors have been changed.
The voice actors aren’t putting much effort or emotion into their performances, they sound completely unengaged; even if they gave it their all, it’s difficult to understand them, because the sound mixing is atrocious, the BGM completely overrides them speaking, and they are too quiet to begin with.
No effort was put into the voice work at all, I know this, because the two unlockable characters have no English voices, only their Japanese ones; no effort was put into any of Bloody Roar 3’s presentation.
This game is far easier than the two games that came before it, and nothing I earned was worth as much effort as I had to put in.
I will be honest and say that Bloody Roar 3 is far more challenging than most modern fighting games in the current year, but there’s an imbalance between what the player has to pull off, and what they earn.
There are frequent and annoying loading times in this game, the game has a loading screen before the CHARACTER SELECT SCREEN!
There’s nothing ground-breaking about this game’s visuals, I have no clue what the PS2 is having trouble with, it’s a static image where a transparent cursor has to be animated; it makes no sense!
Same Shit Different Laxative.
The entire roster from Bloody Roar 2 returns, and they play about the same, nothing radical is changed about their movesets and playstyles, but it’s all the subtle insidious tweaks that really annoy me about Bloody Roar 3.
Long/Uriko/Shenlong all have similar fighting styles, and all the changes in this game affect them differently, because each of them rely mostly on offense, and to get their 6-Level combo going, they have to throw out a three punches to get things started.
My “main” from Bloody Roar 2 was Uriko, but she needs 4 button inputs(5 if you count the Directional Button required as a button) to start her 6-Level combo.
Uriko could launch a ton of attacks, but now it’s harder to get her momentum going, but she retains her weak attacking strength, so the player has to work even harder to beat their opponent, so they completely nerfed her.
The tall, bulkier fighters that play more defensively have been buffed, so Stun(The Insect)/Gado(The Lion)/Yugo(The Wolf) whom take less damage and have an easier time blocking are a little more fun to play.
These grapplers and boxers can wait out an opponent’s offense and deal a massive amount of damage, so they make up for being slower by being in a slower game.
Xion-The Unborn- is the totally-not-Dante-from-Devil-May-Cry boss character, whose actually unlocked from the start.
In scientific terms his Beast Form represents all the evolutionary dead ends, I’m not sure why that’s an evil grey cricket and not a fetus/embryo, but whatever, it’s neat.
He’s pretty easy to use, and can link combo with a ton of hits, but the catch is that his moves are really predictable, so he’s not invincible.
Kohryu-The Iron Mole- is an evil robot version of the Old-Man Bakuryu from the original game, he acts as the ARACDE Mode’s sub-boss if the player can meet certain conditions.
He plays like a shitty version of Bakuryu(II), but he makes up for it by having a cooler Beast Form.
On a side note, the 2 unlockable fighters aren’t displayed on the character select screen, so I meet the unlock-conditions for them multiple times thinking the game glitched out on me, but the extra characters were just hidden from the player.
The total roster is pretty decent, the whole cast would be more fun to play if they were in a better game, but taking the entire cast from the second game and adding 3 new ones on top of that is something to be commended in a modern day where companies charge full price for half a game’s roster, then charge near full price the other half of the playable characters.
Pounding Uranus.
Finally! Bloody Roar 3 has fulfilled my desire from the original Bloody Roar, by allowing me to play as that overpowered boss, though Bloody Roar 1 Uriko has been reworked into a new character called Uranus-The Chimera-!
She has the exact same special moves, impressive reach, and overpowered and lengthy combos.
She’s so overpowered, I was able to reliably use the exact same button combos to endlessly juggle my opponents until they were KOed.
Her Beast form takes up half of the screen, it’s so imposing.
The only drawback to Beastorizing is that she can only use her beast moves as using the Punch and/or Kick button will revert her back to human form, while sending out a powerful shockwave.
One might be wondering why this overpowered nonsense doesn’t bother me, well playing this character is the only real fun I’ve had in this game, and says enough on its own.
The Taco Bell Shits.
The player can unlock plenty of additional modes by pulling off impressive feats in ARCADE and SURVIVAL, which are where most of the game will be played.
These extra game modes are nice and all, but this series keeps shying away from all of its customization features.
No longer can the player combine different game modes; playing ARCADE with no walls, sudden death, and fast speed mods, or anything else that might have been fun.
Bloody Roar 3 segments all the additional modes and mods in their own little menu, so unlocking them is less rewarding because the player can’t have too much fun!
What’s worse is there’s no character model alterations like Big Limbs, Big Heads, etc.!
Imagine if you could only eat a burrito if you ate all of its ingredients separately, so you would have choose between eating a plain tortilla, OR just shredded cheese, OR just refried beans, OR just the meat, OR you could just drink the salsa/hot sauce.
The Drizzling Shits.
I’m not going to tell you this game is shit, but it is a step back from Bloody Roar 2.
The game is slower, has noticable input delay, which makes most of it’s roster less viable, thus less fun to use.
Bloody Roar 3 continues the trend of steering away from customization, having every alternate game mode put inside its own little box, with no way to mix-and-match.
Really this game can be fun, and if THIS was the first entry in the series it would be easier to recommend, but it’s not, it does a shit job following up Bloody Roar 2, and that’s a disgrace!
RATING:
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